I went to a special preview showing of Doctor Strange a few hours before its general release. That’s strange enough on its own… These days, I’m usually the guy who ends up seeing films just before they leave the theaters (fewer crowds) or at home. This time, we made it a special occasion, and had a blast. […]

Okay — it may be late for this year’s Halloween season, but here’s a quick take on two more scary(ish) films: The Hallow – Ah, a film about Ireland and the fairy folk. Except, not. There’s a reason that old house the family moves into has iron bars across all of the windows, and it’s […]

We watched Housebound, a film out of New Zealand and another Netflix show. I didn’t realize that it was a horror-comedy. It definitely sits on the “black comedy” side of things, so don’t expect light laugh-a-minute fare. It’s not rated, but in the U.S., it would be rated R for the blood, gore and language. […]

Okay, the next Netflix Streaming special for Halloween is: Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage. Pay the Ghost is based on a novella by Tim Lebbon. A young child is abducted on Halloween, without a trace. His grieving parents and the police search for him fruitlessly for almost a year. Then, as Halloween approaches the […]

Okay, another Netflix-streaming horror movie… Hush. Madison is an author who has been deaf since her teenage years lives out in the middle of nowhere in a cottage in the woods. A psycho killer discovers her, realizes she’s deaf, and basically lays siege on her home all night, psychologically torturing her before killing her, taking […]

It’s been a month since the overhyped procedural universe game No Man’s Sky was released, to the disappointment of many. I’m not going to comment on what was done right or wrong here in managing expectations. I’m still playing. It’s an easy, go-to game to jump in and play for a few minutes (which usually stretches […]

I recently finished reading Michaelbrent Collings’ newest novel, The Longest Con. Collings is best-selling indie horror novelist, though he has written plenty outside of the genre he’s famous for. Several weeks ago I read Apparition, which was creepy as hell, especially if you are a parent. The Longest Con is not horror. Broadly, it would be Urban […]

It’s scary movie season at the Barnson household. It’s been tougher in recent years to pack in the scary movies in October, because we’re so busy that month. My wife is a professional storyteller who specializes in ghost stories, and was a tour guide for the Salt Lake City Ghost Tours for a couple of […]

Several more hours into No Man’s Sky, and I’m past the point where many players have rage-quit. I’m at about 35 hours in, and still occasionally find myself playing a LOT longer than I intend in a session. Compared to something like Daggerfall, another gigantic procedural world which I spent triple-digits hours playing back in the […]

No Man’s Sky. I kind of ignored it at first, because I have played a LOT of spacefaring games and survival games, and even spacefaring survival games, many of which had procedural content generation. But this one had some really great trailers and screenshots of supposedly procedurally generated landscapes and creatures, and so I soon […]

A few years ago, I got hooked on the Bolitho novels by Alexander Kent. I also read a couple of the Master & Commander series by Patrick O’Brien, the movie based on the books, and a couple of the Horatio Hornblower films. Basically, the whole age-of-sail, nautical warfare, wooden ships and iron men thing. These […]

I recently read Unhappenings, by Edward Aubrey. I wonder if this novel came about from a writing prompt that went something like, “It really sucks to be a time traveler.” The main character, Nigel, suffers from what he refers to as “unhappenings.” Nothing in his life has permanence… things change, and nobody else remembers how things […]

This weekend, we finished watching the series (first of many seasons, I hope) “Stranger Things” on Netflix. Here are some of my impressions. First of all — the gimmick. As I’ve often said, in all entertainment media, you need some kind of gimmick just to get attention. In the case of Stranger Things, the gimmick […]

I finally saw Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The version I saw was the extended edition, which apparently resolves a lot of questions about character motivations, at the cost of a more plodding and confusing pace. So I won’t complain about the pacing here, because… well, I’m sure the theatrical release was better edited. […]

As a game developer, it seems that every other week you hear about a new game coming out that sounds exactly like the one you are making. In the 90s, this would strike us with fear, because inevitably the other guys would be beating us to market with something that sounded exactly like our game […]

When I really started getting into comics – as in actively following titles monthly – it was the 1980s. Two of my favorites, The Uncanny X-Men and The New Mutants, were written by comics legend Chris Claremont. At the time I got into the X-Men, they primarily consisted of Cyclops (Scott Summers), Colossus (Peter Rasputin), […]